by Another Chinese launch, another uncontrolled re-entry of the missile corps.
The China Manned Space Agency (CSMA) began the third and final section of the Tiangong Space Station on Monday (October 31) atop a Makras March 5B heavy lift rocket. As with previous Long March 5B launches, China did not perform a controlled decommissioning of the missile’s main stage after its payload was deployed. This means that, once again, a 23-ton (21-metric-ton) Chinese rocket body will fall to Earth over a yet-to-be-determined location in the coming days.
“For those who have been watching previous editions of this: Here we go again,” Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant with The Aerospace Corporation’s Corporate Chief Engineer’s Office, said during a briefing Wednesday (Nov. 2) discussing the upcoming junk crash site and what could be done in future to avoid such incidents.
While Muelhaupt was quick to point out that “no one has to change their life because of this,” he also stressed that “88 percent of the world’s population is at risk, so 7 billion people are at risk” from Chinese space junk. falling on them.
Related: The Chinese launch next week will set the stage for another major space accident
The Aerospace Corporation team of experts was careful to note that they were not trying to hype the event or create panic. “The answer is that you have a much better chance of winning the lottery tonight than you do of being hit by this object,” Muelhaupt said. “The risk for an individual is six in 10 trillion. That’s a really small number.”
This is far from the first such incident. In July, between 5.5 and 9.9 tons (5 to 9 metric tons) of another Long March 5B crashed in the Indian Ocean after surviving the fall through Earth’s atmosphere. Another Long March 5B crashed in the Indian Ocean in April 2021 since China’s space agency did not perform a controlled descent. And in 2020, after the first launch of the rocket, pieces of the basic stage of the vehicle reportedly fell to the ground in Ivory Coast.
(Most rockets are designed so that their core stages fall into the ocean or unoccupied land shortly after liftoff, or return to Earth for safe landings, in the case of SpaceX vehicles. But the Long March 5B core stage reaches orbit and China lets it stand until you uncontrollably drag it down.)
As more of these uncontrolled Chinese re-entries occur, more and more voices are calling for international laws or rules to prevent such incidents. Marlon Sorge, Executive Director for the Center for Orbital and Debris Reentry Studies at The Aerospace Corporation (LACES (opens in new tab)), said during today’s briefing that international laws are unclear when it comes to such re-entries. “And the reality is that there are no real laws, treaties, internationally that govern what you’re allowed to do in terms of readmission,” Sorge said. “So there’s not really a direct legal way to control what happens internationally.”
For their part, neither China’s national space agencies nor any other official government agency has issued a response to The Aerospace Corporation’s routine monitoring and communications regarding the Long March 5B rocket downfall. Muelhaupt said he was not aware of “any direct comments about Aerospace from the Chinese”, although he had “seen general comments about the West hyping it up”. Sorge said the Chinese government “made some comments to the press at one point, but mostly no.”
“I mean, really what Aerospace’s purpose here is just to report what’s going on — make sure that people you know are informed; they understand that they have a realistic view of the situation,” Sorge added. “There’s not really much to argue about there.”
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